THE EMERGENCY ROOM DIARIES

It was a normal evening at the neighbors’.

My titan son was dragging garage implements around while his botanist sister chased the French chef, who was drinking wine with my pilot husband. The medical doctor brought out a set of perfume samples when I mentioned my recent obsession with scent, and she and I discussed the fall of Western civilization as we snorted them in the lowering sun on the deck.

I looked at the clock, since the smaller humans generally go to bed at 7:30 or else the world slides off its cone, and found it was 7:28. I gasped, gave the pilot a meaningful glance. The pilot, dutiful, drained the last of his wine and made a statement about heading back through the hedge row.

Then the thing that always happens when it is time to go happened, in the clockwork of family life: the “time to go” impulse set off a cascade of Hurried New Pursuits, those bucket-list items of the five-year-old mind loosed into an aspirational surge of activity— tasks and dreams, whole worlds, squeezed between the gathering of shoes and jettisoned clothing items. The botanist gathered herself for a burst of speed and turned it towards the beloved teen female, who had just entered with a damp towel about her hair. The tinkering titan disappeared into the basement, where all manner of tools, toys, and implements could be found for a harried but committed parting tryst.

As the beloved teen female emerged from a wormhole in which she had somehow been able to procure, warm, and serve dumplings to both children in tender replacement of the dinner they had ignored and the French chef had therefore taken it upon himself to eat, a sudden roar emanated from the basement.

It was not a vindictive roar, or a testosterone-surge roar, or any form of roar the poet-pilot parents were well accustomed to hearing rise from the squabbles between the botanist and the titan. It was the kind of roar that contains real urgency, desperation, and dismay.

I hustled over to the door of the basement, wherefrom the titan rose, yelling through a reddening sparkle of tears joining across his spasming face. There was a jumbled story, a loose narrative in pieces—some provided by the titan and some by the beloved teen— don’t know what it was / crashed / no idea what happened / hit something …

When my usual soothings had little effect, I picked up the titan’s play-heated body and prepared to transport it homefor bed, irrespective of agreement. After all, he was tired, hungry. Had had a big day. He went quiet and laid his head against me, which was so unusual that it caused a slight snag in the stocking of the universe.

That’s when the teen said, haltingly and in a low voice as she stared at the back of my child, “I think it’s a bad cut,” whereupon I looked down and finally saw what the child had not been able to say, which was that through his red superhero underwear (the overalls had been shed long ago), a large pool of blood had been soaking, right into my hoodie sleeve as I held him.

I pulled the underwear up just an inch over his glute and saw the gash. It was several inches long and carved so cleanly that the flesh looked like spandex pulled away from itself around a ravine so dark red that it appeared almost black. I hisssed for the doctor and whispered to her I think it may be a “stitchuation,” to try and disguise what was almost certainly coming, full-tilt, towards all of us.

The doctor, who still smelled of perfume samples, took one glance at the gaping wound and nodded. “We are going to the hospital,” she said, calmly.

The titan would not be put in the neighbors’ car. If a titan will not be put in a thing, then, friend, a titan will not be put in a thing. You find your next option.

So I carried him down the road, dripping blood, to the family car at our own house, and had to vacate my body temporarily while I buckled the carseat strap over the gash and darted inside to run the ER checklist: underwear, deoderant, forbearance, phone, charger, purse, snack, endurance, water, dissociation. Fluffy chickie. OK now check other child and firmly assure of quick return, acquire her affirmative signal of having understood that all WOULD BE WELL, hand her off to pilot.*

*Let it be noted that the pilot is a fully functioning co-lead parent but is known to struggle in the open wound department, and so it is generally accepted as the poet’s job to attend wounds, dispatch dying animals, and remove the already dead ones from the house. Maggots, also, are the poet’s domain. It would be more fair but not as fun to enumerate the pilot’s many cheerfully and expertly dispatched duties of daily life; suffice it to say here that open wounds are not among them.

*

Let it be said that the act of Registering is Awful at large; let it be said that the act of Registering is compounded in its profound stupidity when one is holding a 40-pound bleeding titan who has not had dinner and has begun dimly to suspect that needles will be involved in his care.

I am thankful to find in this moment that the computer system at the ER does seem to know who we are, so the portion of the Registration that asks for the names and phone numbers of your three best friends in kindergarten, your preferred cereal brand, and a description of your first prom date’s boutenir is kindly waived.

I am half way through a small sigh of relief when the small titan shouts angrily I AM FEELING VERY WELL TODAY AND THIS BOO BOO IS GOING TO HEAL ON ITS OWN, while the blood drips down him, over his mother, and into the one shoe he is somehow wearing, on the wrong foot, along with his blood-soaked underwear and deeply rumpled, damp t-shirt.

In moments like these, one may suddenly see what one’s child looks like to the rest of the world—40% grass-stained skin, general lack of comprehensible clothing; his matted, sweaty hair, his mud-smeared cheek (how long has that been there?), the fingernails that look like inky crescent moons, polished to tiny claws by a whole lifetime of eager grasping distilled into a few magical, careening years.

But the nurses are almost pleased; this is what kids look like when they are doing kid-ly things, the one nurse who is older than twelve says. The other nurse, actually a PA assigned to our case, probably weighs in at about 72 pounds. I am immediately concerned that my titan will make shockingly quick work of her, really ruin her self-confidence for the next decade while she finishes elementary, middle, and high school. When I realize this lightweight is also the individual who has been designated to execute the stitches into my son’s flesh, I think, you and what army, Kelsey?

[Nurse names should really be more robust. Lori. Deb. Roxanne. Bruno. Thanos.]

After an hour of in-depth discussion with the bleeding titan regarding popsicle flavors and mower decks, and some YouTube fare from “Heinrich the Lawncare Kid,” someone arrives with lidocaine gel. Somehow they get it onto the absurdly muscled, still-bleeding heinie while I shift the superhero undies out of the way; my child has at this point made it crystal clear to everyone involved that if we have to remove the undies the whole deal is canceled, and he is going through the plate-glass door if needed.

So I become Discreet Undie-Shifter among other functions. One of those is enduring the fact that I have to pee so badly my eyeballs are watering.

Three days later someone comes back, clears the cobwebs off the lot of us, and pokes at the “numbed wound,” which is found to be somewhat less numbed than advertised when the titan tries to punch his mother in the face.

“We’re going to have to do some lidocaine shots,” 72-lb Kelsey says perfectly audibly, and I feel I might have to kill her where she stands— but for the fact that she is the one who entered us into the ER’s computer system as a case of “uncontrollable bleeding,” though we are not, so that we could get to the front of the line, and so, I owe her my life and a kidney and thus cannot smite her.

As I feared, the titan has heard the keyword. SHOT. And lo, the full force of his writhing capsule of sentient, quivering muscle activates with the electricity of forty-three lightning strikes, and I know that the army is going to need more than training and supplies. They are going to need the help of the gods.

When 72-lb Kelsey finally sees the coiled vitality of the herd of wildabeest before her, incarnated in one five-year-old’s absurdly muscled legs, back, and core (her face sort of crumples in an invisible wince), she quietly slips out “to maybe go find a helper.” Kelsey, an *army*. Not a helper. An army.

As it turns out, the army will have to be me.

The helper does arrive; she is no Thanos, but does register somewhere between Roxanne and Bruno, probably weighing in around 170 or so. Apparently they don’t have anyone of the 200-lb and up caliber available. Ah well, we will work with what we have.

This is going to have to be quick, and certain, I say to the group of women, making definitive eye contact with the floral physician, Roxanne-Bruno, and a beet-red Kelsey, who is now clutching her blue paper sheet and sewing kit and holding a tub of something pink and sudsy which I note will very soon be all over the floor.

They each give a micro-nod, and Roxanne-Bruno flips the child onto his belly as everyone locks into place.

It is instantaneously clear that Roxanne-Bruno’s original suggestion to me, which was to “try being up near his head talking to him while we hold him down,” will not in any universe suffice, and that my own body weight in its entirety is required—in addition to R-B’s full torso, the floral doc’s wiry grasp-shackles, and Kelsey’s one free elbow upon a shin— if our titan was not going to blast a hole through the paneled ceiling and take all of us with him onto the second floor for a flaming exit there.

I lay my whole body upon my child. One of my hands grips a shin and one presses the opposite hip so he can’t roll, and I wonder how he is going to be able to breathe at all as he screams. My face, as luck would have it in this position, is right next to the wound, and I have front-row seats to Kelsey’s trembling efforts at the TEN required shots, their slow, pressurized probings and plungings (DEAR GOD HOW CAN IT TAKE A HUMAN THAT LONG TO SWITCH GRIPS BETWEEN THE STAB AND THE PLUNGE), each of which causes a series of tectonic thrashings and roarings from the titan who has now gone full-on wolverine.

Blood streams onto the sheet. The child’s voice goes raspy. I don’t quite know how anyone is getting enough air, and then I remember how one time at Pony Club camp when I was eleven, the vet was showing us the inner workings of a dead horse’s lower leg and hoof, which had been sawed in half longitudinally, and I was just getting really into how cool the stretch and pluck of the still-functioning tendons was when I realized that two giant, irrevocable black doors were closing around my vision and that quite soon the lights would be well and truly out.

Well, that’s all 72-lb Kelsey and dear R-B and the still-scented physician and the straining, bucking wolverine need, I think—a passed-out sand-bag of a mother draping into an open wound with her tangled hair and stress-sweat armpits. NOPE, I tell myself, and scootch a bit so that my heart is about on the same level as my head and there isn’t one ounce of extra work my body has to do to get the blood to the ol’ brain-bucket.

We make it. Somehow, it is finished. R-B and the hospitalist relinquish their grips, I manage to stand, Kelsey moves her sewing kit and the pink suds out of range, and the wolverine now rises into an unsteady stand, alone in the center of the splattered table, glowing with rage. He sees that he is done, that all hands are off, looks around, panting, and comes at me, roaring, with both fists.

THOSE

POKES

WERE

HORRIBLE

he screams, stopping with defiant fire between each word and punching my open hands with force and accuracy.

YOU DID NOT HAVE MY PERMISSION AND THAT DID NOT FEEL GOOD

The discrepancy between the molten vessel of his body, bent on destruction of all existence, and the oddly sweet lexicon of a thoughtful, tinkering, poetic five-year-old is sufficiently absurd to register as a tender, awkward bandage upon the whole of our strange, cruel world.

I AM GOING TO STOMP OUT OF HERE THIS MINUTE AND NEVER EVER COME BACK says the trembling, erect, neon-blond body, still clad in blood-soaked superhero underwear and one wrong-footed shoe.

We all nod, we all encourage the free and full discharge of his terror and rage; R-B even offers her open palms alongside mine for him to bash away at. At this open, giving gesture, he softens suddenly, realizing he does not in fact want to hit this kind stranger who had brought him a stuffed dragon.

But he does see an opening.

I DO NOT LIKE DRAGONS he says. DO YOU HAVE ANY CHICKIES.

And then the Great Negotiation begins, wherein the wolverine subsides into standard tinkering titan form, and the chatter burbles out and flows and sparks into dreams and plans— vending machine / different stuffie / popsicle / maybe cinnamon bun… and then the crowning glory, the blazing sun of all the boy’s aspirations, rises on his mother’s shaking lips:

AgTrack, I say, in profound repentance, from a pooling, gushing love, from a relief at no longer having to witness and bear his suffering.

We will go to AgTrack for a double dualie John Deere. As soon as they open tomorrow.

The child’s breath catches, and he smiles so broadly I think his face might dissolve. I think as we prepare to leave that I might dissolve, too—into him, and the goodness of his wellness, beneath his nine neat stiches and an already-slipping bandage; into the goodness of the cold vending machine cinnamon bun, and the crescent moon he crows to from the depths of his now-flooding delight as I carry him into the night.